Trinity College to use Game Tech in Dublin Research

Game technology provider NaturalMotion has announced that Trinity College Dublin will use the company’s game animation system, called morpheme, for the college’s Metropolis research project, which will study large-scale crowd simulations in a computer generated virtual Dublin. Researchers in the Graphics, Vision and Visualization Group (GV2), part of the School of Computer Science and Statistics, will use morpheme to power the character animation within the Metropolis research project. Morpheme is an animation middleware designed to give developers and animators more creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees, and transition graphs in real time. The system launched in 2007. “morpheme is an excellent animation engine with great tools support,” said Dr. Steven Collins of the GV2 Research Group in Trinity College Dublin in a press release. “In Metropolis, we’re aiming for very high fidelity character movement, for large numbers of characters, employing blending of motion captured data and real-time inverse kinematics. The morpheme animation editor tool allows us to quickly sequence motions at a high level and seamlessly deploy these in our engine run-time which means we can focus on the research problems of behavior simulation and motion planning.” “The fact that morpheme is being used in an academic pursuit is very fulfilling for NaturalMotion, because the research behind our technology originated in academia,” said Andy Payne, vice president of NaturalMotion, which is based in Oxford, U.K. “The researchers who will have a chance to use morpheme at Trinity College will be experiencing the same tools professional developers are using in AAA game titles.”